In March 2019, the Global Citizenship Education Fund submitted an application for the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Call for Proposals in Research and Innovative Action. The topic for this call was “Drivers and contexts of violent extremism in the broader MENA region and the Balkans”. This was done as part of a consortium of a total of eight institutions and organizations from across the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the MENA region, which also form part of the Global Citizenship Education Fund’s Working Group on the prevention of radicalization.
The proposed project aims to strengthen human rights-based national and regional responses to violent extremism by civil society organizations in the Mashreq, the Maghreb and the Western Balkans regions, in the fields of non-formal education and youth empowerment, with particular focus on women. There are two key components to the proposed project: research into radicalization (its causes, its theological foundations, and patterns and routes for foreign fighters); and the capacity building of local civil society organizations.